Chapter 6: Maya

(Sienna)

The reception hall smelled like white roses and circling piranhas.

I skirted the edge of the room on my way to the ladies’ facilities, watching the guests circulate with their champagne flutes and their carefully manufactured smiles, and I thought: this is not a celebration. This is a crime scene. We're all just waiting for someone to draw the chalk outline.

Both my head and my ovaries were still spinning with the promise of Adrian’s whispered words at the altar. Add in the sneering stares, badly hidden whispers and my parents avoiding me, and I knew I was slowly spiraling into something beyond mere panic.

"Sienna."

I turned.

Maya Chen looked exactly the same as she had the last time I'd seen her, which had been — god, eight months ago? Nine? She was in a deep emerald wrap dress, her dark hair pinned up with a single gold clip, and her expression was caught precisely between delighted and deranged.

Whatever composure I'd been manufacturing shattered immediately.

"Maya."

We collided somewhere in the middle in the kind of hug that had nothing performative about it. Just the full-weight, both arms, face in shoulder variety that only worked with people who had known you long enough to have seen you cry over a tragic movie ending.

She held on.

I held on harder.

"I didn't know you'd be here," I said into her shoulder.

"I'm Celeste's friend too, you disastrous ghost."

She pulled back and held me at arm's length, scanning my face with eagle-eyed scrutiny. "I was going to ambush you at the reception. Make you explain why you've been so scarce."

A pause.

Her eyes narrowed. "And then other things happened."

"Maya—"

"Outside." She had my wrist already. "Now."

She found a small courtyard off the east corridor. The sounds of the reception became muffled. Manageable. Somewhere behind us, a string quartet was playing something that felt almost satirical.

Maya released my wrist and turned to face me.

"Sienna." Her voice dropped. "What. The hell."

I looked at my champagne. I looked at the neglected fountain.

"It's complicated."

"Obviously it's complicated. You married your sister's fiancé. Today. At your sister's wedding. Give me something to work with."

I flinched. I knew exactly what I did, but hearing it from someone else makes it sound… extra.

"There's a clause," I said. "In the acquisition agreement. It was the only way to save the company, and Celeste—" I stopped when she shook her head wildly, eyes narrowing at me like a schoolteacher eyeing a naughty child.

“You are making no sense. Start over. Slower.”

The fountain burbled between us. Somewhere a bird made an entirely inappropriate noise.

"It's an arrangement," I said.

Maya stared at me.

"A business arrangement. There's a clause in the merger agreement, the one between Hartwell and Swift Aviation, and it stipulates that certain conditions have to be met for the partnership structure to hold."

I heard myself speaking in the flat register I used for boardrooms. I couldn't seem to stop.

"The financiers on Swift's side have a covenant. Old money, extremely specific language. The deal includes a share exchange: Swift shares granted to the bride, Hartwell shares to the groom, and the covenant requires that whoever the bride is must be operationally qualified. Involved in the business. Not—" I stopped. "Not ceremonial."

A long silence.

"Not Celeste," Maya said.

"Not Celeste."

Another silence. Then Maya made a sound that was technically a snort but contained entire universes. "'Bride must have relevant aviation credentials.' They wrote that into a merger covenant."

"Old money is eccentric."

"Old money is unhinged." She crossed her arms. "And Celeste agreed to this?"

My whole body exhaled a sigh as I threw my head back and searched for stars. Fat luck in the middle of London.

“Of course not.”

There was a world of regret and pain and trepidation in those three words.

"Right." Maya's voice was careful. "So why was Celeste engaged to him in the first place if the clause was always going to be a problem?"

"Because nobody knew about it until… a few hours ago."

She narrowed her eyes at me again.

"Okay." She started to pace. Three steps, turn, three steps. The way she always did when she was assembling something.

"So the clause gets flagged. Celeste can't satisfy it. And then at the ceremony, in front of everyone, this man stops the wedding." She stopped pacing. "And looks at you."

The fountain burbled.

"Yup."

“So he knew about the clause?”

My heart did a surprised thud in my chest. Did he? It didn’t seem so directly after in that vestry. But why else…?

"Sienna." Maya's voice had dropped into something quieter and considerably more dangerous. "Something’s fishy. And I’m not just talking about arranged marriages and ditched brides in the twenty-first century."

I looked at my left hand.

The platinum band sat there, simple and irrefutable.

"I’m still assembling the picture," I said. "Everything happened very fast. All I know is that I had to save Hartwell Aviation. I couldn’t let the whole thing collapse because of a stupid clause no one seemed to know about."

Maya's expression softened slightly. Not much, but enough.

"Are you okay?" she asked, quieter now.

"I think so." I turned the champagne glass in my hands. "Ask me again in three hours."

She nodded. Watched me for a moment with a perception she'd perfected over twelve years of friendship.

"You know I'm not leaving, right? I'm going to be in this with you however weird it gets."

"I know." Something loosened in my chest. "Thank you."

A small silence settled between us. The comfortable kind, the kind that only came with people who knew you too well to need to fill every gap.

Then Maya said, casually, like it had just occurred to her: "So... what about Ollie?"

The champagne glass nearly went through my fingers.

Oh shit. I forgot about Ollie…